


John Watson's Litany of Perception

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV John Watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-11
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-02-04 07:30:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1770799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We're all alone - we all believe ourselves to be alone - so stop reading yourself as a series of false truths and come in from the rain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	John Watson's Litany of Perception

I think if a person is forced into solitude for whatever underlying reason, or perhaps not even forced but circumstantially find themselves becoming more distanced from the majority of mankind, they get progressively lonelier. At first, that loneliness is despised; it’s an insurmountable barrier, a chokehold. And over time that reconnect with people becomes an even greater obstacle to achieve, and you find yourself floating away from it with it barely in sight, but soon everything is blurred and echoed slightly, like you’re underwater, like you’re asleep. 

The worst thing is, I think, that people don’t really notice. Not quite yet, anyway.

But as life progresses in this disassociated state you begin to grow accustomed to only being around yourself, and facades that you once thought perhaps were natural fade into uselessness, only revived under fake and transparent ‘interaction’ towards a gain, whether that be giving change to the cashier at the supermarket or goading someone into telling you secrets. You gain a sense of incredible understanding of society, I believe, when you remove yourself from it. 

So yes, you become more blank - some could argue more inhuman - accustomed to thinking your own thoughts inside your own head rather than plastering them all over your face. You become a more individual unit, you are the prime example of adaptation, of survival of the fittest, you understand and document but never participate because participation can only ever lead to vulnerability. The only voice you know is your own handwriting. What a lone creature you must become; you are unreactive, unapproachable, you have evolved the most perfectly thickest of skins.

And so, it transpires that people begin to believe you are truly dysfunctional: dissociated to your own kind merely because you don’t demonstrate the same levels of empathy they all do so carelessly, so stupidly. But, of course, you know. You know they don’t trust you, you can see them looking. For a short while - and only a short while - you perhaps relish in the fact that you understand the inner workings of your own mind so much better than they all do, that you understand them and their motivations and their pointless existences better than they could ever understand themselves.

And then the barriers again, they go up. It’s hurtful, but you won’t admit it. It’s hurtful to go unnoticed for so long and then become noticed again so suddenly but for all the wrong reasons. So the barriers keep rising. Before long you don’t start to believe them, not exactly, but you start to tell yourself all the same things that people keep telling you. If you are a sociopath then it’s okay to be like this, it’s okay not to demonstrate feeling because allegedly you don’t feel anything at all. There it is, there it goes, there’s another vulnerability gone that you refuse to allow yourself, merely to become stronger and better than their language because they’ll never speak yours. You think that makes you powerful, but I can read you and you’re only creating more weaknesses that you can’t see.

Now you tell people things, lies about yourself because it’s easier that way for them to accept you, it’s easier for you to accept yourself. But Sherlock, you’re not defective or flawed. You were just a very lonely little boy, I think (I hope it’s not too obnoxious of me to presume), and you didn’t quite know how to understand that, how to cope with that. So you shut yourself away in boxes and behind experiments and fraudulent personas. Everyone thinks you don’t feel anything at all, but the problem is, the real problem is that you think you feel too much.

You’re wildly intelligent, yes, but you’re not different. You were just lonely. The thing is, you see, you don’t have to be anymore.


End file.
